Those who must play, can't play -- another angle
I read this and have some thoughts about the situations Havoc observed. The rundown is that someone made them roll for something Havoc felt wasn't necessary or, I presume, fun.
GMs in my circles get ahead of this by only making players roll in social situations if there's a clear risk, or when they're trying to make the NPC do something they wouldn't otherwise do. I think what Havoc observed is correct, obvious even, in that there was no reason to make them roll. It's clear from the situations they described that their character was doing something familiar to them and/or was without perceivable risk. Simply being at court and approaching a noble is itself relatively neutral if the character has an established background in high society. It's conceivable that GM realized too late that Havoc had a player character who would have been overpowered in a court setting. After all, when your character can move through high stakes social environments with ease, it comes with powerful benefits that maybe can or should be counterbalanced (depending on the established parameters of the game). Since this was a surprise to Havoc, I'll assume it wasn't discussed prior to game start. They thought they were engaged in one thing, and the GM decided it was something else.
For a player who was leaning in to a commoner, peasant, or vagabond type character, making them roll for Courtesy would be fun (or at the very least, anticipated) because the player opted in to being a dumbass within courtly contexts.
It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play. --James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games, 1986.
If a GM decides things on behalf of my character, I'm not playing a game. The GM is playing alone with supplementary material provided by me. Whether this is the situation or not is an expectation to be established prior to playing. We have to define who the players are in order to play. We can think about the "roll to open the door" adage for this. If your character has no severe injury, established disability, or conditions otherwise that make opening doors difficult, it makes no sense to have to roll to open a door. Similarly, if your character is understood to have navigated court settings throughout their life and has no established debility, asking a player to roll for Courtesy just for starting a conversation is rolling to open the door.
I think this applies to both the fiction-first kinds of games I primarily play and the more meat-grindy tables where the narrative is incidental. We all have to reach an understanding about the type of experience that's happening.
My rule of thumb as a GM is: does a roll push the narrative, or does it punish players for playing? Did they know this roll was coming? Can they change their minds? All of these questions promote playing for players--presumably the purpose of getting together for games.